In this video, Mani shows us an example in Kotturpuram slum where ten thousand people live in extremely poor sanitary condition. Every lane in the slum is covered with rotting garbage and sewage flowing out of homes and clogged drains. No municipality worker comes here to clean the roads or clear the drains.
This is because, Mani says, slums are never considered as important as other areas of the city by the administration. So services such as sanitation and garbage collection hardly reach the slum dwellers.
Though residents of Kotturpuram slum have made repeated complaints to the municipality over the unclean roads, nothing has been done. Now, if we are to think that every slum more or less share the same set of problems such as sewage, unclean water and road, we get a picture where the city administration is practically ignoring the need demand of nearly one and half million people!
Waste management and sewage treatment have been Tamil Nadu’s worst areas of performance. There are two rivers that flow through Chennai city – Cooum and Adyar. Both of them are heavily polluted. The Cooum in particular has been severely polluted with effluents from some business establishments, and plastic bags and sewage from slums on its banks.
Mani who lives quite close to Kotturpuram says that currently the government of Tamil Nadu working on a plan that aims to make Chennai ‘slum-free” by 2013.
As a part of the plan, Tamil Nadu government has started constructing several residential complexes across Chennai to rehabilitate slum-dwellers. But Mani says, besides providing shelter, the government also needs to provide other civic facilities to the slum dwellers. Otherwise they will continue to live in the unhealthy condition that they do now.
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The Student Teacher Ratio and School Area needs improvement
In this video of UPS Manwan Awoora school, Kupwara, Kashmir, the community correspondent Pir Azhar shows us that there are nine classes for 250 students, and due to lack of space, the lower primary classes are held outside in the open. Also the school has only 7 teachers.